Five disciplines, not levels
SAFe is organised into five disciplines: Leadership and Culture, Lean Portfolio Management, Large Solution Integration and Delivery, Product Development Flow, and Team and Technical Agility. Each is a broad area of practice, and within each sit competencies framed around specific business problems.
Why it is like this
Organising by discipline and business problem lets an enterprise adopt the parts that answer a question it actually has, rather than working top to bottom through a diagram. It is also what lets SAFe be pitched as an operating model rather than a process.
Not to be confused with
The levels of the Big Picture — Team, Program, Large Solution, Portfolio — which is how most people still describe SAFe and how most older material is written. Disciplines are the current organising idea, and Program stopped being a level some versions ago.
In practice
If someone describes their SAFe implementation in terms of "the program level", they are describing a version of the framework that has been renamed around them. The work is probably still fine; the vocabulary is dated.
Source: SAFe Glossary (Scaled Agile, Inc.) — SAFe Disciplines. Read on .
SAFe® and Scaled Agile Framework® are registered trade marks of Scaled Agile, Inc. ytyk.org is not affiliated with, endorsed by or licensed by Scaled Agile, Inc. These cards are independent commentary written in our own words; no SAFe text, graphic or Big Picture is reproduced here.
Say it back Check yourself
Name the five SAFe disciplines.
Answer out loud or in writing first, then open the points below.
The points a good answer makes
- Leadership and Culture
- Lean Portfolio Management
- Large Solution Integration and Delivery
- Product Development Flow
- Team and Technical Agility
Product Development Flow is the one to watch: it was called Agile Product Delivery until recently, and a great deal of material still says APD.